Daisy-Chain USB

G

Guest

I have a need to connect more than 20 USB devices to a single computer. How
can I do this when there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, and each device
must be mapped as a letter? I want to be able to access them all
simultaneously, or nearly so, and I won't be able to help the end user of
this system all the time plugging and unplugging USB devices. The OS is Win
XP Pro SP2 with all updates.
 
G

Guest

You can acheive this using USB hubs.

Interlink each hub until you get 20 ports for the devices. I believe static
drive letters
cannot be used if user has need to unplug the device.

You can connect upto 127 devices this way while the limitation of drive
letter applies.
 
G

Guest

This still does not answer my question. The user will be plugging in at
least 20 USB devices. What if they need to plug in 30? How will windows
assign all USB devices a static drive letter?
 
E

E McCann

You say "devices." Are they all drives? Drives need a letter, media readers
often will as well, but other devices do not.
 
G

Guest

Why can't the customer look for a higher capacity Flash drives ? This should
minimize the number of Flash drives and maintenance too. I am sure the
customer may not have that much data to backup. If that is the case, he has
to look for other options which is more reliable and easy to maintain.

Anyway as you have asked. Check this if it addresses your question:

http://www.rekenwonder.com/linkmagic.htm
 
G

Guest

Each flash drive is going to be assigned to a truck. When a driver comes
into the yard, they will take their drive and plug it into an open port. A
batch file will run at a certain time and update the files on all drives.
Then in the morning each driver will take a random drive and put it into use
in his/her own truck.
 
G

Guest

This does not sound right. What if this company grows ? Will you look for a
1000+ USB port hub ?

There are plenty of other options.
Think twice before you advise any thing to this customer.
 
G

Guest

I'm not the boss. Customer is not right. I work for the ICS dept of the
company. Unless the town quadruples (another 120,000+) in the next 10 years,
the company will not be expanding too much. Right now there are only 20-30
vehicles going to use the system. If need be, we (ICS) can set up 2
computers with the batch file. This is the most economical and plausible
situation. We've already explored all other options, including wireless
networks. If you have any ideas I'll be glad to pass them on to my
supervisor.
 
G

Guest

Oh.

I was thinking of easy portable devices like PDA's ( Palm, iPAQ personal
organizers). This device is reliable in such a situation. Data transfer can
be done in GBs using SD cards and personal organizer software can determine
the user account to which data is to be synchronized.

I hope you had this idea already as it seems you have analysed till Wireless
cards.

Economically, yes, you can think of USB flash drives at this situation that
supports NTFS ( you may loose some space due to ntfs ), mount them to folders
instead of drivers letters ( you can have the folders in the name of route #
or the driver). Check if unmounting and mouting is possible easily through
your batch file.

Hope this helps.
 
G

Guest

The data is a very large map file ( ~1.5GB). Each vehicle has a small
computer with a map reading program. This program is not available/feasable
for a handheld computer.
 
N

NoStop

SSVEC said:
Each flash drive is going to be assigned to a truck. When a driver comes
into the yard, they will take their drive and plug it into an open port.
A batch file will run at a certain time and update the files on all
drives. Then in the morning each driver will take a random drive and put
it into use in his/her own truck.
Well I wish you good luck! My experience with XP and USB2 is that it is so
unstable you'll be lucky to do what you want to do. But maybe it'll work
for you?
 
G

Guest

No, truly. This often takes several minutes on a fully operational Pentium 4
desktop, and much longer on a top of the line Celeron.
 
J

j9

You may have to map some of these drives as folders in other drives. Or you
may have to forgo mapping drive letters and simply using unc paths to access
them remotely.
 

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